


Contact with Watney

by yatima



Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2018-04-26 21:26:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5021113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yatima/pseuds/yatima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our long national nightmare is over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fresh air

Beck was studying my x-rays when I came out of the shower, his face serious. He inhaled deeply and said: “Fresh air at last. Thank Christ. Our long national nightmare is over.”

“Oh, you’re hilarious.”

“Says you. Let me check the dressing.”

I sat on his bunk and he knelt in front of me to run his hands over my broken ribs. While his attention was occupied I took the opportunity to stare down at him. Sure, I hadn’t seen another person in eighteen months and just looking at any living human, even Vogel, would have made me drunk with delight. But Beck is a straight-up knockout, eyes like the ocean and cheekbones out to here and warm clever capable hands and muscular arms and under his tshirt, all hard muscle. He smelled amazing; he always did. And he was kneeling in front of me, and I was wearing a wet towel. I wondered if he could see me blushing. I wondered if the towel covered the fact that I was getting hard.

“There’s not a lot we can do about rib fractures, sorry about that. But don’t be shy about asking for pain relief,” he said. “Suffer in silence, you’ll breathe too shallow, avoid coughing, you’ll set yourself up for a chest infection. Speak up and take your pain meds. Got it?”

I was holding my breath anyway, and it was all his fault. “Yes, Doctor Bossy.”

He looked up at me then with those completely unfair eyes, lashes long as a girl’s, mouth in a half grin. His mouth; let’s not even talk about his mouth. “I liked it better when you called me Handsome.”

Yeah, he could see me blushing all right. We noticed at the same moment than I was leaning into his warm hands. He slid his right hand up to my left cheek and I turned toward it, couldn’t stop myself kissing his palm. He was smiling now.

“Skin hunger, it’s called,” he said.

“Doctor, I need pain relief,” I said, my voice catching, and Jesus, he laughed softly and leaned in and kissed me, left hand gentle against my aching ribs, right hand moving up to tangle in my hair. He was water in the desert, I couldn’t drink enough of him, I had one hand on the back of his neck and the other on the small of his back. He was strength and sunlight, Earth and home.

Pulling away from him was, no lie, the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done.

“But Beth,” I said, and he chuckled again, damn him.

“Right, she’ll kill me if I don’t cut her in on this action,” he said. I caught my breath and he tensed, pulled his hand away from my ribs, said: “What? Did I hurt you? Did you - is this okay with you?” His face all worry.

“Okay with me?” I said, and that time I did choke on it, and felt the tears welling. “Greatest pity fuck in history. I am SERIOUSLY FINE with it.”

“You’re an idiot,” he said with relief, and kissed me again. “Fuck pity,” he murmured against my mouth. “Beth loves you. I love you. Didn’t you know?”

Of course I didn’t. Not like this. “...she’s weird.”

“True that.” There was a tap at the door. “Perfect timing,” said Beck, “come in,” and Beth slipped through and locked the door behind her, slipped onto the bunk next to me and wound careful arms around my neck. She turned my face to hers and kissed my mouth while Chris kissed the pulse in my throat. She tasted like rain and rescue.

“Lewis,” I said weakly next time we came up for air.

“Like, totally signed off on it,” said Beth dreamily, between kisses. “So far outside normal mission parameters, we might as well be on…”

“Mars?” suggested Chris.

“Fuck Mars,” I said.

“You’ll regret it forever if you don’t,” he said, which didn't even make any sense, but the three of us laughed until we fell over, until we were lying on the bunk, Beth stroking my face and gazing at me like I’d come back from the dead, which, well, and Chris behind me, holding my hip, kissing my neck and hair.

“I knew you’d fix my back,” I said, and he laughed again.

Let’s be real, sex wasn’t happening, I was too badly injured and barely holding together exhaustion like I’d never known before, like an ice crevasse, but I slept between them like a puppy with his littermates and my skin and blood seemed to learn from them how to breathe and flow again, to remember how to be a person.


	2. Sunlight

When I opened my eyes, Beth was propped up on an elbow, watching me sleep.

Humans have evolved to pay attention to each others’ faces. Face recognition makes some ungodly number of different structures in the brain light up under an MRI. Those parts of my brain hadn’t lit up in a long time.

Like plants grow towards light, we grow towards each other. Faces are sunlight to us, and no face has ever been more sunlight to anyone than Beth’s was to me the first morning after I came back from the dead.

Chris was snoring and spooning me with one warm hand holding my hip, and that was pretty great too. Skin hunger felt exactly like hunger. Mine was probably skin famine. It felt as if there was no amount of touching that could put the parts of my body back together. It felt as if Chris’s affection were the duct tape holding the vacuum at bay. 

Or to put it another way, my best friends in the universe had slingshotted off the Earth’s gravity well, burned a year of their lives and risked everything to rescue me, and whatever they’d pulled aboard the ship was barely human any more, a broken thing. I swallowed.

“Are you sure,” I said rustily, my voice still turning over like a bad ignition, “that this is okay with you?”

“For fuck’s sake,” said Beth sweetly, “your Martian gallantry is gonna bore me stupid, dude.”

“What now,” said Chris sleepily.

“I’m guessing some pretty severe self-loathing, rooted in guilt, probably?” she said, and when my eyes widened, added: “I come from Circumstances, okay, and you STEM types should maybe crack a book sometime, trauma awareness, it’s a thing.”

“Be gentle with my patient,” said Chris, and yawned.

“I don’t want to fuck things up,” I said, “for you two.” Any more than I already had.

“Honey are we good?” asked Beth.

“No. You talk too much and you’re a devil witch in bed.”

“Oh, that’s a point, should we demonstrate? Watney, do you like to watch?”

Okay I know how this is going to sound, but sometimes it sucks to be a white dude, such as when you are so embarrassed that the entire surface of your skin catches fire, and the devil witch who has caused you this embarrassment starts to laugh at your dismay.

“Right, I’ll take that as a yes shall I, this is going on your permanent record. V for voyeur.”

“Wench,” said Chris. “Succubus.”

“Shut up and take off all your clothes,” said Beth.

He jumped off the bunk with alacrity and pulled off his sweater and shorts. I sat up to get a better view, wincing at my ribs. They both saw me wince, and the both stopped themselves before they could fuss. I saw them do it. I hadn’t thought I could love the two of them more, but the day was turning out to be full of surprises.

Beth slipped off the bunk and stood in front of Chris. She let her eyes travel all the way down, pausing briefly at his mouth (open and already breathless), his throat (pulse throbbing, Adam’s apple moving as he swallowed), his pecs and flat abs, the V above his thighs, his cock already hardening just from her avid gaze.

“Okay,” she said, “don’t touch.” His hands flexed and clenched.

She touched one of his nipples and he caught his breath. She kissed the other. He bit his lower lip. She traced circles with her mouth and fingers, then changed sides, and his breath got harsher and his cock harder, until, holding onto his hips, she left a trail of kisses down his belly, knelt down, took him in her mouth, looked up at him and, God help us, winked.

His breath stuttered. His hands flexed and clenched again. I stuck my hand down my pants. He curled one hand into her hair and after a literal eternity, said hoarsely, “Beth,” and drew her to her feet for a deep kiss. As soon as he released her she shucked off her sweatpants and wound her arms around his neck. With a practiced move he lifted her up against the exam table. She crossed her ankles in the small of his back, and he thrust and thrust and thrust into her and then paused, breathing hard and digging his fingers into her thighs.

“Mmm?” she said.

“Don’t wanna come yet,” he gritted out.

“Mmm,” she said, amused, and then when he said “Fuck!” and came in three more thrusts, she laughed and laughed until her laughter turned into her orgasm.

Me, I came in my pants.

We all cleaned up and ended up back in the bunk, this time with Beth in the middle and Chris spooning her.

“Where the hell did you learn to do that?” I asked.

“Like I said, I came from Circumstances, you know?”

“Trauma-awareness, it’s a thing?”

“It’s a thing,” she said. “For the longest time I didn’t wanna do sex at all, and then when I couldn’t stand this dude making sad puppy-dog eyes at me any longer, we had to try a lot of different stuff to find out what worked. Like, he can’t touch the top of my head, or put his weight where it’s pinning me down, or - oh, a bunch of other stuff, or game over.”

Chris smoothed her hair back from her face. She couldn’t see his expression, which was a complicated mixture of tenderness and pride in her, so intense and private it was hard to look at.

“Anyway it turned out it works really well for me when he lets me run the show, more or less, and it seems to work for him too.”

“No complaints,” said Chris stoically.

“You called me a devil witch in bed. Like, ten minutes ago.”

“That,” said Chris, “was not a complaint.”


	3. Mouth to mouth

Beth, it turned out, was a kisser, like Chris, and, for that matter, like me. She weaponized it, for motivation. Chris’s new thing was inflicting pain in the name of “physical therapy to rebuild muscle mass” or whatthefuckever, and Beth promised that if I didn’t complain too much, she’d kiss me. I apparently never even approached the limit of how much complaining would’ve been too much. That girl had an astronomically high threshold for putting up with my bullshit. And she didn’t stint on the kissing either. She kissed like she wasn’t going anywhere, like she had all the time in the world. Technically, I guess she had all the time in a couple of worlds.

I tried to argue that sex would qualify as physical therapy too but Chris refused to entertain my completely reasonable arguments.

“Frankly I’m impressed you can get off at all, the state you’re in,” he said.

“First of all, rude, and second, I got blue balls the size of planetoids,” I said. “Probably showing up on the Kepler observatory, an earth-like binary system.”

“Well there’s a condition previously unknown to space medicine,” said Chris. “Think of my research career. I could write papers. And look, you can come all you want, more power to you. But I let you start fucking me and Beth? You’re gonna turn it into a marathon of trying to make US come, and you’re gonna sprain something.”

I couldn’t actually summon a snappy comeback for that, and he laughed at the expression on my face. “Yeah, you’re right, that does sound exactly like something you would do.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I am selfish and lazy in bed.”

“Uh huh,” said Chris. I was up on the examining table. He put down his motherfucking clipboard and got all up in my personal space until I could feel the heat of his body. His ocean eyes dropped to my mouth, and he bit his lower lip and then looked up at me again through his tangled lashes. “I am not saying never. God only knows how much I want your cock, spaceman.”

The cock in question leapt to attention, and I groaned.

“Just be patient,” he said, and for that I hooked my legs around his hips and pressed my open mouth to his collarbone and sucked until I’d raised a bruise.

For the rest of the day, every time I laid eyes on him, I saw the mark of my hungry mouth on his throat, and I blushed. He laughed every time, and Beth watched the two of us, and licked her lips.

That night she lay down next to me in the bunk, her nipples already hard under the thin fabric of her shirt. I brushed my hand over them reverently, and felt the shock waves running through her. She arched her back into my touch.

“Let me get you off,” I murmured in her ear.

“Fuck,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that filthy pretty mouth of yours all day. Curse Chris and his professional concern for your wellbeing.”

She flipped me onto my back and straddled me, pinning my wrists over my head. She was immensely strong and I was weak as a kitten and had no chance to escape her even if I wanted to, which I absolutely did not. She gave me one of those I-got-nowhere-else-to-be kisses, then trailed her tongue down my throat and did the same to each of my nipples. She took her sweet geological time about it, so that when she finally did take my cock in her mouth, I went off like a star going nova.


	4. God of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one's for Minnie Driver.

I woke up screaming, again, because that’s fun. Beth was sitting on the floor with an e-reader, chewing her thumb.

“Bad dreams?” she asked.

Well, sure. Sometimes it was the piece of antenna in my gut, the long walk back to the hab, the pliers digging into my abdomen in search of things that would make future metal detectors go off. Sometimes it was the explosion inside the lab and the bright flame sucking all the oxygen on the planet out of my aching lungs. Sometimes the airlock broke loose again and I tumbled around inside it like a glass bead in the neck of a bottle of Japanese soda.

This wasn’t any of those. This was my hand slipping out of Beck’s gloves, missing the tether, reaching back towards him as the blackness and stars drew me out of reach; his face as he strained towards me, knowing he’d lost me again, knowing I’d gone and died on him again.

My face was covered in tears and snot. I turned it towards the wall.

“Go away.”

“Nuh uh.”

“I’m shitty company.”

“I have low standards,” she said.

“I’m tired.”

“So rest.”

“You’re wearing me out.”

“Stop thinking you have to entertain me.”

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“A Transparent Attempt to Change the Subject, the Mark Watney story.”

“Fuck you.”

“It’s that history of the #metoo movement.”

I groaned. “Thought you were supposed to be cheering me up.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Now I hate myself for being a privileged cishet white man.”

She recoiled like a snail from salt. “God. God, seriously?” she said.

“I’m just saying, there’s a spectrum. Like, masturbating in front of someone. Not the same as raping a kid.”

Beth looked at me for a moment, her mouth working. Then she said: “If you offer me a burger with a little bit of shit in it, or one with a lot of shit in it, which am I gonna choose?”

Chris was standing in the doorway. I wondered how much he’d heard.

“Neither,” said Beth. “Because I don’t eat shit.”

I looked at Chris. “What’d I do?”

“You’re on your own, Watney,” he said. “I’m with her.”

My hand slipping out of his glove. Darkness.

 

I shouldn’t have gone to Lewis for sympathy, obviously. Face like stone.

“I didn’t mean to upset her,” I said. “She’s alluded to, I guess, a personal history of…”

“You can say it,” said Lewis.

“I guess. Abuse? So I guess I inadvertently triggered that?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t have a history of abuse,” said Lewis. “Not like that. No more than any woman. And I find your framing - let’s say ill-informed, to be charitable.”

“Can you explain why? In little words?”

She looked at me with an unreadable expression. “Watney, you’re my crew. I’ve worked beside you for half a decade. I mourned you for a year. I hijacked my own ship to come and get you. I think I’ve demonstrated how far I’m willing to go for you.”

“Not sure I follow.”

“That’s context for me declining to teach you Feminism 101. It’s not laziness or lack of investment on my part. I point you towards the ship’s excellently stocked library because I care. I cannot do this for you. No one can. You gotta fend for yourself.” She climbed the ladder out of the bridge and pushed off into zero-G. Her voice floated back: “You’ve done that before. I believe in you.”

Vogel and Martinez were in the galley. I made my case and Martinez threw his hands in the air. “Peace out, brother.”

Vogel frowned.

“I ain’t getting on the ladies’ bad side,” said Martinez.

“They don’t want you opting out, they want your allyship,” said Vogel.

“Oh so you think I’m the bad guy too,” I said. “That’s just great.”

Vogel leaned back in his chair and looked at me, really looked at me for a minute. “I’m gonna need more coffee,” he muttered.

“Let me make that for you,” said Martinez, springing up.

“Good man,” said Vogel. “Watney, talk to me about Mars.”

The blood drained from my face. Who died and made it hit-Watney-where-it-hurts day?

“Mars is a bitch,” I said. “Mars wants me dead.”

“Good,” said Vogel, his face intent. He leaned forward, hands pressed on the table. “Now tell me about Earth.”

“Trees,” I said promptly. “Liquid water. Clouds. Air with oxygen in it, that I can breathe.”

“Great. Great,” said Vogel. “Now a thought experiment. Mars is a person. The god of War. You with me? Mars is bigger than you. Still wants you dead. Can beat you half to death. Cut off your air supply. Never let you go.”

I swallowed.

“OK. Now there is four billion of him. Four billion gods of War. Walking around on Earth. He won’t always try to kill you. Most of the time he won’t. But any time, any second, for any reason, or no reason… he might. Any one of him might.”

Martinez put steaming NASA coffee mugs in front of each of us and took a long draught of his own.

“Point taken,” I said.

“Is it though?” said Vogel.

“All I was saying is, there’s degrees.”

Vogel drank his coffee, put down his mug. “No. No. There’s no degrees of dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [So this happened.](http://people.com/movies/minnie-driver-slams-matt-damon-over-sexual-misconduct-comments-seriously/) And yeah, folks. God knows I don't wanna harsh your squee but I gotta work some shit out here.


End file.
